Warning over 'fake' olive oil as 2,425 litres seized

For many people, olive oil is one of those kitchen staples that quietly earns its place on the counter, often splashed over salads, drizzled onto sourdough, and trusted to do a lot of heavy lifting in everyday cooking without much thought.

Unfortunately, that trust has been wearing thin for a while now. As prices continue to climb across Europe, olive oil has slowly shifted from pantry basic to luxury item, and with that shift has come a growing sense of unease about what’s actually inside the bottle.

Food fraud isn’t new, but when a product becomes more expensive and harder to source, it suddenly becomes far more attractive to the wrong kind of attention.

In fact, food experts have been warning for years that olive oil is particularly vulnerable. Food detective Nicolò Cultrera once said, as reported by Euro News: “Olive oil is the food that is most subject to adulteration and to fraud among all food products.”

It’s a harsh assessment, but one that’s increasingly hard to ignore as cases continue to surface across the continent.

Olive oil’s rising value has made it an increasingly attractive target for food fraud (Isabel Pavia/Getty Images)

That wider issue came sharply into focus earlier this month in Portugal, where national outlets like The Portugal News revealed that authorities seized 2,425 litres of counterfeit olive oil in the Porto metropolitan area.

The product in question wasn’t dangerous in the traditional sense, but it wasn’t what it claimed to be either. Cooking oil was being sold as extra virgin olive oil, misleading consumers and undercutting legitimate producers.

Investigators didn’t stop there. The operation extended to Bragança, where a further 14,920 litres were found at an industrial unit producing and selling edible oils. Officials also confiscated 1,217 counterfeit labels, suggesting the practice was far from accidental or isolated. The timing is no coincidence, coming during a period when olive oil prices have surged, and shoppers are more likely to be tempted by deals that seem too good to be true.

Mislabelled olive oil is often difficult for consumers to detect without laboratory testing (Israel Sebastian/Getty Images)

Portuguese authorities issued a warning to consumers, urging people to be cautious of unusually low prices and to read labels carefully.

And it’s advice that applies far beyond Portugal’s borders. Across the EU, reported cases of olive oil fraud and mislabelling have hit record highs, driven by climate-related production drops and soaring costs.

As noted by The Guardian last year, prices have more than doubled since 2018, and show no sign of slowing down.

To counter the resulting rise of the food fraud problem, safety experts are increasingly turning to technology. Portable DNA testing kits are now being used to verify whether oil genuinely comes from the olives and regions claimed on the label, bringing lab-level scrutiny directly to mills and producers.

It’s a promising development, but one that highlights how complex the problem has become.